Blowing the Whistle on the CRS

We wrote about the partisan, low-quality work being done by the Congressional Research Service on intelligence issues here and here. Now the Republicans in Washington have finally begun calling the CRS to account. Today, Rep. Peter Hoekstra, Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, wrote to CRS Director Daniel Mulholland, critiquing the Service’s report on the President’s alleged failure to adequately brief the Congressional intelligence committees. Here is Hoekstra’s letter in PDF:
It’s an excellent letter; it begins:

Dear Mr. Mulholland:
I previously wrote to you on January 9, 2006, regarding CRS’s work on certain intelligence matters. Specifically, I expressed concern that CRS should not speculate on highly classified intelligence matters on which it could be erroneously viewed by the public as an authoritative source, and that its previous work was not conducted in a thorough and objective fashion. Subsequently, CRS issued another memorandum with similar problems. I ask for immediate action on your part to ensure that CRS truly provides “comprehensive and reliable” legislative research that is “free of partisan or other bias.”

As to CRS’s most recent report, Hoekstra begins:

Once again, CRS has issued a memorandum on a highly sensitive issue on which it had no firsthand knowledge of the practices being followed by the Committee and the President and ignored highly relevant legal authorities and considerations.

Bam! Read it all.
CRS’s partisan efforts on behalf of the Democrats are another example of the federal bureaucracy’s covert war against the Bush administration, the great untold story of the last five years.